ty for the reply with your experience so far. I was thinking a wiki page on performance might be nice to have.

The OS + ram was going to be my first steps to improve the problem, like you and some of the others, I feel the ram starvation is the main culprit here. I also found the answer to my ram question. You can mix ram speeds, but it will only run at the slowest speed. So, I have 4g DDr2 800, I'm trying to decide if I should buy the whole 8g of previously reccomended 1066, which nobody seems to have around here, or just get another 4g of 800 to match what I already have.

I still have this question.

I have this shiney new raptor 10k rpm 300g hard drive, and since I am going to have to do a complete OS re-install anyway, does it make more sense to make the 10k rpm the master that I put the OS on and possibly move the alts to the slower drive that is now the master, or the opposite, keep it the way it is and move the alts to the secondary faster drive?

The secondary question was if there was a performance benifit of partitioning the master drive and loaded the os on one partition and the apps on another, or would that slow things down ?